Trump Announces US Will Halt Funding to the WHO
Evan Vucci/AP
We ran the numbers: There are 2215 news articles covering this topic. 39% (869) are left leaning, 40% (881) center, 21% (465) right leaning.
On Tuesday, President Trump said he’s suspending U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, stating that the agency has “mismanaged” the pandemic and has been slow to respond to the crisis. While left-leaning articles highlight confusion experienced by USAID staffers on how to handle the coronavirus, right-leaning articles highlight the WHO’s mishandling of the pandemic.
A left-leaning article by Politico highlights that a group of officials with USAID, an agency on the front lines of the battle against coronavirus, couldn’t get a clear answer to their question regarding if they could tell America’s longtime global health partners that they were allowed to use U.S. funds to buy coronavirus test kits and certain chemicals. Many USAID staffers say that they feel frozen as the virus rips through poor countries, and instead of receiving clear guidance from the Trump administration’s upper echelons, they are getting mixed signals.
NPR published a centrist article reporting on the timeline of coronavirus comments from President Trump and the WHO. After Trump issued his executive order banning anyone who has been in China in the last two weeks from coming to the U.S., WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged countries not to impose travel restrictions. Trump called this move “very China-centric.”
A right-leaning article by Fox News reports that Trump declared that the United States would undertake a 60-90-day investigation into why the “China-centric” WHO had caused “so much death” by “severely mismanaging and covering up” the coronavirus spread. The article also states that the Chinese government also began suppressing news about the virus, and Wuhan medical staff were suspected to have contracted the disease.